The honorific Da Cheng, Great Completion, was conferred on Confucius in 1104 by the Song dynasty Emperor Huizong, drawing on a phrase from the philosopher Mencius describing Confucius as the sage who brought all earlier virtues to their fullest completion, and the title was subsequently attached to the main sacrificial hall of Confucius temples across China, the Dacheng Dian, and to the hymn sung there during the Shidian rite.
Ritual hymn texts honoring Confucius existed before this formal title, dating in some form to the Han dynasty institutionalization of his cult, but the classical liturgy familiar from later imperial practice, fixed verses paired with a specific musical mode and instrumentation, took its more settled shape under the Song and was further revised and standardized under the Ming and Qing dynasties, each of which issued its own court approved musical scores for the ceremony. The hymn text itself is brief and formulaic by design, built from four character lines in the manner of classical Chinese ritual poetry, praising Confucius's virtue, his transmission of the ancient sage kings' teaching, and his enduring instruction of ten thousand generations, language meant to be intoned rather than read as an original literary composition.